This is a remarkably clean honey process coffee, with sparkling complex acidity. In the cup you’ll find notes of fresh Fuji apple, punchy tropical fruit, and a honey graham cracker finish.

It’s been a very long time since we offered a Costa Rican coffee, but over the years we’ve been looking for an offering that felt like it was worth the wait. While we’ve sourced coffees from Costa Rica, we’ve never been able to get our hands on a lot of coffee from the legendary Las Lajas micromill, at least, not until now!

The Chacon family established their tradition of growing coffee on the Las Lajas property over eighty years ago. Yet in 1980, tragedy struck the farm after Oscar Chacon's father suffered a tragic illness the family believed was caused by regular exposure to pesticides. Only eighteen years old at the time, Oscar took over the family business, deciding to change their tact entirely to be one of the first all organic coffee farms of the region. This decision was made a great many years before organically grown produce was a part of the public consciousness, and long before there was any such price premium attached to it. In 1997, Oscar married his wife Francisca, and together as a team, they have forged their own path in the specialty coffee market. They worked with a cooperative for many years to process their coffee until 2005 when Francisca and Oscar invested in a mechanical coffee depulper. This was merely the beginning of their foray into the arena of coffee processing.

In 2008, an earthquake wiped out their access to regular electricity and running water, the two most essential resources needed for processing coffee. In response, they merely adapted their practices, building African-style raised beds to use the sun to dry out their coffees, and utilizing the natural process to preserve their water resources. At a time where almost every lot of coffee coming out of Costa Rica was washed, this was one of the very first lots of naturally processed coffees to come out of Costa Rica. Since then, through a combination of tradition, innovation and necessity, the Chacon family and the team at Las Lajas have been pushing the boundaries of what specialty coffee processing can accomplish. They have gone on to develop completely novel honey and natural processing methods, experimenting with fermentation, using exhaustive data to learn from their experiments and so much more. Their story is not only remarkable, but inspirational, as through their time working together in the industry, they have done so much to adapt and persevere through many of the challenges that have been thrown at them. The fact that this honey processed coffee is excellent is not only a huge bonus, but a testament to their longstanding expertise.

This is a remarkably clean honey process coffee, with sparkling complex acidity. In the cup you’ll find notes of fresh Fuji apple, punchy tropical fruit, and a honey graham cracker finish.